BTC-USD Perpetual Futures

Asset Overview

Bitcoin (BTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency designed to serve as a means of exchange independent of any central authority. BTC enables electronic cash transfers in a secure, verifiable, and immutable way. Launched in 2009, BTC is widely regarded as the first virtual digital currency to solve the double-spending problem by timestamping transactions before broadcasting them to all nodes in the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin protocol addresses the Byzantine fault-tolerance problem through a blockchain structure — a concept that traces back to work by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991. The Bitcoin whitepaper was published in 2008 by an individual or group using the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto", whose true identity remains unverified. The protocol uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm based on SHA-256d. The network targets a 10-minute block time and has a maximum supply of 21 million coins, with issuance rate decreasing over time. To compensate for variability in block times due to network conditions, mining difficulty is retargeted using an algorithm based on the previous 2016 blocks. Bitcoin blocks have a 1 MB size limit, and the ecosystem has adopted scalability and feature upgrades such as the Lightning Network and Segregated Witness (SegWit) through soft forks.